Company: Intuit, Inc., Consumer Group
Company background: Intuit is the global technology platform that helps consumers and small businesses achieve financial confidence. Intuit powers prosperity with TurboTax, Credit Karma, Mint, QuickBooks and Mailchimp.
Contact: Katie Harris
Title: Sr. Manager, TurboTax Community
Related URLs: https://ttlc.intuit.com/community
Kudos Category: Best-in-Class: Community
1. Describe the organization's objectives in launching a Khoros community. What is the use-case and purpose of your community (support, enablement and learning, marketing awareness, customer success, driving sales, product innovation, etc.)? Has the community charter evolved since its launch, and if so, how?
Intuit is a pioneer when it comes to a fully integrated and robust customer Community. In 2018, after having already spent over 10 years in community support, TurboTax Community on Khoros was launched as a parallel experience to our in-house Q&A solution. One year later, we streamlined our Community to one single platform, powered by Khoros. From there, the Community grew to include four geos - US English, US Spanish, Canada English, and Canada French.
Purpose
The TurboTax Community drives confidence in financial and tax decisions so customers feel assured they can complete their taxes accurately and return to TurboTax year after year.
Customer Success
To our customers, the method in which they prefer to receive support varies. Information and resources must be readily available for every person - when they need it and how they want it. Community plays a critical role in allowing a contemporary option to access credentialed expert answers to their most complex tax and financial questions, but also valuable responses and insights from other members.
Being an extraordinary online content-generating engine is only the beginning for TurboTax’s Community. The most exciting (unique to Intuit) aspect about how our Community ensures customer success is its ability to integrate our user-generated content into the TurboTax product. As a user prepares their tax returns with TurboTax, high quality, Community-derived content appears in the product’s help panel. This means that our customers are supported by the Community without ever having visited the Community itself.
Revenue Generation
The TurboTax Community is effective and efficient. The richness of the long tail of user generated questions and answers effectively translates into an eight figure incremental annual revenue. Community is also an efficiency play: call deflection and the benefit of the one-to-many principle mean experts can instead spend their time answering the difficult questions that truly need a phone or video call to answer.
Loyalty
Customer loyalty is the heartbeat of any thriving business. Without it, growth doesn’t happen and success isn’t sustained. This is where Intuit’s TurboTax Community has evolved over time. It’s grown beyond a space for simple Q&A to a realm of valuable discussions and tools in all areas of personal finance. Our Community is about relationship building and doesn’t just come alive during tax season - it’s a trusted space for customers to communicate, no matter what time of year.
2. How did the community get brought to life? Was there executive/business/stakeholder buy-in? What was the process to gain this buy-in? How was cross-functional support and organizational adoption achieved?
Our senior executives, all the way up to Intuit’s founder, believe in the power of Community. Customer obsession is at the heart of our business, and the TurboTax Community pairs hand-and-hand with this operating value.
A competitive edge the TurboTax Community provides is authentic and specific expert advice. We have a Community-dedicated team of 60 certificated tax and personal finance professionals. Using credentialed experts allows for our customers to get the most accurate advice, but also instills confidence to move forward with their financial growth. Khoros Care takes expert engagement further by allowing us to track team performance using a myriad of agent analytics.
Community Engagement
Our Community is much more than a tool to respond to customers’ questions. We’ve implemented exciting new concepts and programs, with goals ranging from furthering engagement to celebrating our Champions.
- Ask the Expert Events - TurboTax users love interacting with experts at our monthly AMA events! The Khoros Events discussion style has helped us organize and promote these popular offerings, with topics ranging from crypto, to dependents, to W-4 help, and more. Additionally we worked with Khoros to build a customization to better curate the wonderful libraries of content produced from each of these events for added value beyond event day.
- Sweepstakes - Everyone loves a chance to win a prize! Regular sweepstakes entice and encourage customers to revisit and engage.
- #CommunityChatter - To add a little “fun factor,” we regularly craft prompts such as “This or That” posts to get conversations flowing. With a little creativity, tax chat is a blast!
- Proactive Tax & Financial Content - In our industry, it’s critical to provide easy-to-understand, sometimes entertaining, and always helpful content. Monthly spotlight articles, using Khoros’s Blog discussion style, focus on customer concerns, while our video series, Tax Expert Tutorials, demystifies common questions customers may have.
- Gamification - Using Khoros’s integrated functionality, we have created a complex system of badges and ranks to show our members that we “see” and recognize their contributions. At last count, there are over 80 possible badges that can be earned! Writing posts, helping others and participating in events are just a few ways to earn badges and rise through the ranks.
Intuit Champions Program
We celebrate our top contributors like no other! When we come across a member who has high quality responses and appears to thrive in helping others, we invite them to join our Champions program. Membership comes with perks!
- Welcome box to celebrate their elite status
- Public recognition with the Champions designation, along with entrance to a private forum, with access to Intuit employees
- Surprise and delight tokens of appreciation
- Coffee Chats and educational webinars for Champions to connect and learn
- Appreciation weeks for Champs to have fun and feel valued
- Opportunities to beta test new product features to shape innovation
- Complimentary Intuit software for their personal financial journey
- Statements of gratitude from Intuit’s senior leadership
Student Champions Program (Canada)
An exciting new partnership with Humber College in Toronto allows accounting students the opportunity to earn college credits by helping out in the Community. Students gain real world experience in the tax realm, while Canada’s TurboTax users get timely answers from those with up-to-date tax knowledge.
SEO
TurboTax is THE online tax authority. Not only is our Community the space for our own customers seeking answers, but it’s a top resource for other tax and financial pros as well. Because of this, maintaining and building SEO strength is supremely important. To ensure findability, numerous SEO-friendly customizations have been implemented, with continuously updated answers and identification of obsolete content.
Innovation
Intuit utilizes design thinking methodology (Design for Delight, aka D4D) allowing us to learn from our customers, understand what works, what’s missing, and how their experience can be even better! Through a variety of tests, interviews, and empathy sessions, we are constantly improving and developing our Community.
Key highlights of recent innovation work include:
- Unified login making it easier to navigate between Intuit’s online properties and software offerings
- Clearer pathways to TurboTax and live tax expert help if needed
- New features on forum pages to improve customer success, such as relevant tax tools (a), top FAQs, and more
- Life Event hubs engaging users year round as they move through the chapters of their lives (b)
- Easy methods to collect feedback, while moving customers further down the path to success (c)
- Khoros Care customizations that allow our Champions to see when employees are responding and vice versa, enabling both groups to divide and conquer
3. What were the results? More revenue generated, a reduction of costs, improved customer experience, more innovation, etc.? Tell us how Khoros helped you achieve those results. Please include quantifiable metrics if possible.
Incredible results are inevitable when you have the right intentions, goal-driven strategic design, bold implementation, and senior leadership buy-in. Intuit achieved higher TurboTax conversion rates for Community users, while generating millions of dollars in revenue and significant cost reduction for the business.
Over the last year we saw:
- 90,000 conversations started in the Community along with an astounding 230,000 replies (a quarter of a million!).
- 26% more accepted solutions than last year.
- An 8% reduction in response time, with most threads receiving a reply in 30 minutes or less.
- Higher quality user traffic, with a 35% jump in engagement rate.
- A 17% improvement in CSAT, with more users reporting that they were very satisfied.
- Our Intuit Champions crafted about 55,000 answers this year. Of those, nearly 23,000 replies were authored by our top two Champion contributors alone.
These powerful results are due to greatly improved customer experiences and upleveled Community engagement programs, such as a 62% increase in public events hosted over the last year (22 total), expanded proactive content initiatives, and a list of innovative new features.
Now that’s an effective and engaging, Best-in-Class Community! We can’t wait for what the coming year will bring!
Case Study Opt-In: Yes
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